“We are in worse shape than we were before the last drought, and we are going to be in even worse shape after this one" 

When James Brumder and his wife Louise Gonzalez moved into their home tucked up against the mountains northeast of Los Angeles, he applied all his know-how to the task of undoing the thirsty garden they inherited.

Brumder, who worked for a commercial landscaping company, pulled up their weedy, unkempt lawn in Altadena and replaced it with native grasses, filled in garden beds with species that could make a living off the region’s fickle rainfall, installed drip irrigation, set up rain barrels and banked soil to collect any errant drops of water. Whenever the backyard duck pond – a blue plastic kiddie pool – was cleaned, the water was fed to drought-adapted fruit trees.

It was 2013, a year before a statewide drought emergency was declared, but even then the water crisis was apparent to Brumder and most everyone in California:  A great dry cycle had come again. Four years later, it receded when a torrent of winter rains came. The drought, finally, was declared over.

Generals know that you always fight the last war. So California — already in the clutches of another drought emergency —  is looking over its shoulder at what happened last time, anticipating the worst and evaluating the strategies that worked and those that failed. 

So is California in a better position to weather this drought? Some things are worse, some better: Groundwater is still being pumped with no statewide limits, siphoning up drinking water that rural communities rely on. In northern counties, residents are reliving the last disaster as water restrictions kick in again, but in the south, enough water is stored to avoid them for now. 

The good news is that in urban areas, most Californians haven’t lapsed back into their old water-wasting patterns. But, while some farmers have adopted water-saving technology, others are drilling deeper wells to suck out more water to plant new orchards. 

The upshot is California isn’t ready — again. 

“We are in worse shape than we were before the last drought, and we are going to be in even worse shape after this one,” said Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California at Davis.

The most acute problem, experts say, is the lack of controls on groundwater pumping.

“Despite increasingly occurring droughts, we could be doing much better than we are doing,” added Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. “We manage finally to get some statewide rules about groundwater, but they are not going to be implemented for years.” As a result, he said, aquifers are still being over-pumped and land is sinking. 

Three-fourths of California is already experiencing extreme drought, a designation that only hints at the trickle down of impacts on people, the environment and the economy. Nature’s orderly seasons are upended: As the winter so-called “wet season” ended, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in 41 counties. 

This year’s drought is steadily approaching the peak severity of the last one, climate experts say. It’s a dangerous benchmark: 2012 through 2015 was the state’s driest consecutive four-year stretch since record-keeping began in 1896. 

Much of the state has received less than half of average rain and snowfall since October, with some areas seeing as little as a quarter. For most of Northern California, the past two years have been the second driest on record. 

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides about a third of California’s water, dwindled to 5% of average this month, equaling April 2015’s record-low percentage. That signals trouble for California’s reservoirs — even before the long, dry summer begins.

Already, the water stored in major reservoirs is far below normal as some rivers’ runoff has dipped below the last drought’s levels. Lake Oroville, which stores water delivered as far away as San Diego, has dropped to just under half of its historic average for this time of year. 

Megan Brown, a sixth-generation cattle rancher in Oroville, worries that climate change might finally make her the last of her family to run cattle in California. Dry pastures can force ranchers to sell livestock or buy expensive feed. 

Usually, she said, the hills on her ranch are as green as Ireland in the spring. But by the end of April, dry golden grass had already started to claim the slopes. The blackberry-lined creek on Brown’s ranch is so parched that her dogs kick up clouds of dust as they nose through the rocks.

“It’s turning,” she said, looking up at her browning hills dotted with so many fewer cows than usual. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”

All Californians were ordered to conserve, and state officials in 2015 mandated a 25% statewide cut in the water used by urban residents. Homeowners used smartphone apps to turn in neighbors for over-sprinkling their lawns, and cities hired water cops to enforce the rules. Hotels notified guests of reduced laundry service.  In restaurants, glasses of water that used to automatically appear were served only after patrons requested them.

Agriculture took a $3.8 billion hit from 2014 through 2016. More than a half-million acres of farmland was taken out of production for lack of irrigation water, and an estimated 21,000 jobs were lost in 2015 alone.

The astonishing aridity also killed more than 100 million trees and weakened millions more, setting off a catastrophic cascade: The carpet of dead trees added fuel to California’s wildfire epidemic. Fire season stretched year-round and into normally damp parts of the state. 

As rivers heated up, their flows dwindled and about 95% of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon were lost below Shasta Dam in two consecutive years. A record number of commercial and recreational fisheries were shut down, and countless ducks and other waterbirds died as wetlands vanished. 

Droughts are expensive for taxpayers. The legislature appropriated $3.3 billion toward drought response from 2013 to 2017, including $2.3 billion in voter-approved bonds. About $68 million was spent on emergency drinking water for communities where wells went dry, but the biggest chunk funded projects to begin augmenting supply, such as more water recycling and groundwater management.

Now, to address the current drought, the Newsom administration has proposed spending another $5.1 billion, for a start. But the “start” may be already too late.

Learning to live with less

Between 2013 and 2016, Californians on average reduced their residential use by 30%. Since then, per capita water use has ticked up, but Californians used 16% less water in recent months than they did in 2013. 

The state’s cobbled-together policies of carrots and sticks managed to reduce water consumption in cities statewide. California officials toughened standards for toilets, faucets and shower heads and ramped up efficiency requirements for new landscaping. Millions of dollars in rebates were offered by state and local water agencies to coax Californians into replacing thirsty lawns. 

When conservation alone wasn’t enough, an executive order by then-Gov. Brown gave officials the authority to send help to well owners and struggling small water systems.

Ranchers face difficult decisions

Katie Roberti of the California Cattlemen’s Association told CalMatters that ranchers are facing the most severe conditions in decades. “Without precipitation many California cattle producers are going to be forced to make the difficult decision to reduce the size of their herds, some more drastically than others,” she said. 

Megan Brown, the Oroville rancher, already sold a third of her cattle — including all of her replacement breeders that replenish her herd — after the dry 2020 winter, when the grasslands they forage on dried up.

“We were ahead of the game because we saw the writing on the wall,” she said. “If you don’t have the grass, you’re not going to make the money.” 

She sold “anything that looked at me funny, or had an attitude, or I thought would fail or wouldn’t make me money,” she said. “It was hard, some of these cows I’ve had for ten years.” 

The US Department of Agriculture declared a drought disaster that allows growers and ranchers to seek low-interest loans. 

But Brown refuses to accept a loan. “Our family history has a saying that if you can’t buy it in cash, you can’t really afford it.”

Brown has seen back-to-back calamities hit her land: drought, torrential rains and then fires that destroyed wooden flumes that ferry water from the west branch of the Feather River to Oroville and landowners like her along the way. 

“It’s all these things, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam — every year. It’s not supposed to be like that. We’re supposed to have these once in a generation,” Brown said. “It’s more. It’s worse.” 

She’s already weighing how to adapt her ranch to a changing California, such as raising heritage hogs and turkeys instead of cattle, and wondering whether there’s a future in emus. 

“It hurts, man, it hurts your soul,” Brown said. “I always felt like I might be the last one in the family to run cattle. I’ve just had a bad feeling. And this kind of makes it real, like my bad feeling was justified.” 

This year, the state expects to deliver only 5% of water requested from the State Water Project. And there’s an indefinite hold on federal allocations for some agricultural users both north and south of the Delta. 

Of all the lessons the state should learn, this might be the most valuable: “There’s never enough water in California,” the Pacific Institute’s Gleick said. “We have to assume that we are always water-short and we have to act like it.”